Elgan the Enganeer

"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he shall not depart from it", says "the Preacher" in the Biblical book of Proverbs, chapter 22, sixth verse.

We search for meaning and fulfillment in life. Discovering our gifts and talents early can be to our advantage - if we follow a path of potential realization consistent with who we really are, we'll "never work a day in our life", because we will do what we love, because it is what we are.

My son Elgan once got the VCR to eject the tape with the remote control - yet there was no eject button on the remote. To this day his mother and I chuckle because it was one of the earliest indicators we recognized, that Elgan had a knack for understanding how things work.

Last week we took a trip to the Ontario Science Centre (well worth the membership we have, great for when kids are home from school and looking for something to do). We visited the K'nex area at around 4pm and Elgan decided he was going to build a Ferris wheel. By 4:50 he was pretty much done. Planning, designing and then building within a budget (in this case, the materials available and the time alotted), check, check, check. I had no idea what he had in mind, or what it was going to look like, and his final product was quite remarkable. The video attached shows its functionality.

Every indication is that "the way he should go" is engineering school.

The medium shouldn't have become the message

A few weeks ago I read an article in the Toronto Star, called Connect or Die, about Jeff Jarvis, media guru. In it, he mentioned that newpapers should evolve or die, and that death would come to the industry relatively quickly.

Today I read about the bankruptcy of the parent company to the venerable Chicago Sun-Times. I've thought about this for a while, and the two stories highlight the issue that I'm now writing about.

For too many of the industrial age publishers, the important part of the word "newspaper" to them was "paper." It should always have been "news."

Paper was just the medium, the message should have been the news. As it turns out, the paper itself became the message. And now that paper is waning vs the electronic media, they're hard-pressed (no pun intended) to adjust to the shift.

Paper, hard copy, is yesterday for many reasons. The industrial age was very tactile, very physical. Paper was tactile, physical. At the same time, there wasn't much going on in society, relative to all that tantalizes the attention today. For many, the newspaper was more than "just the news": 

• it was their window on the world at a time when they probably would never see other lands let alone travel outside their home continent or city;
• it was their connection to others, providing something to talk about;
• it was their entertainment. "Reading the Sunday paper" became as ritualistic as church, with sections laid out all over the floor around the big chair;
• it even gave people a reason to get out of the house. Indeed, Louis Armstrong even wrote a song titled "I Guess I'll Get the Paper and Go Home", because people actually did that. And while out, they might sit in a coffee shop, or stop to talk to the grocer or general store manager, or take the paper and sit on a park bench...

Today, we are much more mobile, much more travelled, much more connected to the world both in terms of immigration and the simple exposure to other cultures as well as electronically through television, the internet and all the information and access it offers. The internet also means we don't have to go out as much. I remember doing research in libraries. Today I have access to much more information online from home. When I was a kid, the thing to do after school was go out and play - street hockey, bike riding...today, neighbourhood streets are devoid of kids doing such industrial age things. Today, everything is on a screen - movies, video games... kids don't "go out to play anymore" (I stand corrected, they've got portable games they play in groups now)...

As I write this, my wife is saying "isn't it cool how we don't have to write letters to a talk show anymore, we can email them in real time and actually participate in the discussion live?" Indeed.

Newpapers are dying because their focus was on printing paper. Society's focus has shifted, and they've been slow to keep abreast. We now live in the information age. Information is key. People aren't consuming less news, we're saturated with information, email, RSS feeds, websites, online subscriptions, tweets (which I haven't even gotten into yet)... We are on online fantasy leagues for every sport under the sun, and then some...we are online watching the outcomes of every facet of a game that can be bet on, and we place these bets with online, off-shore books because it's so much less sleazy to place a bet on the sanitary interface of a computer than with a shady character in an alley or down by the shipping yards...

So the problem is not that we don't want news; we want news more flexibly, more dynamically, more now, than paper, in all its static glory, can support. We are also a more environmentally-concerned generation than our factory-building, pollution-spewing industrial grandparents and parents. Cutting down trees to print yesterday's news today just doesn't seem worthwhile when, with a few clicks, we can read 6 different views on the news today, with columns and blogs to enhance our understanding. People use their cellphones with text-messaging to announce that the subway is delayed at the next station - these are things that paper is too static and slow to support. As so many pieces of our lives are delivered to us on our computers, cellphones and PDAs, we lose any connection to a newspaper - it's just not very relevant anymore.

But, make no mistake - newspaper printers should have, and still can, function in today's society. They are, after all, experts at gathering and disseminating information. If they distribute it online, and restore focus on the news, there may be no need to lament the obsolesence of the newspaper, anymore than we remember saddles (the issue was transportation, not the mode), or 8-track tapes (the issue was the music, not what it was played on). And news organizations are also where we look for verification of news. When the word began to spread that Michael Jackson had died, people were hearing about it plenty before the "official word" was provided through "the real news" - anyone can start a rumour, but hearing it on network news gave it a sense of "ah, now it's official." And, of course, when there is news to make, a press release is where an official statement is offered to "the media", who can then convey it to the public. Imagine a news organization disseminating press releases by blog, text messages, RSS and Twitter subscriptions...with an advertising footer in each? 

To that, I say "Extra! Extra! Email/text/tweet all about it!"

Nut Allergies

I am allergic to nuts.

Usually, my reactions are manageable with orally-ingested, over-the-counter antihistamine. I've never gone into anaphylactic shock. I do get hives, my salivary glands go into overdrive, I get itchy all over, and sometimes it requires, even after taking antihistamine, that I regurgitate whatever I ate.

Even the smell of certain nuts can trigger a mild reaction. I think walnuts and almonds are the worst. If I eat a cookie that is picked up with a utensil that had been used with nuts, I may have a reaction.

When I was a kid, I could eat a Tofiffay® by eating around the hazelnut, and I wouldn't react. Today, I wouldn't think of doing such a thing. I remember that chocolate bars such as Coffee Crisp or Kit Kat had hazelnuts in the ingredients and I could eat them, but I'd get a very small reaction that didn't even require antihistamine to tolerate. Hazelnuts have since been removed from the ingredient lists of both products.

A few years ago, I had a reaction that nearly closed my throat, the first such reaction in my 35 years (at the time). Last year, I ended up in an ambulance. I was advised that there is no way to predict how I might react and that my history was no indicator of what to expect in the future. Yes, I could experience life-threatening shock, so I was prescribed an epinephrine injector.

My question is: why can I eat peanut butter?

Let's clarify that question. We're talking about smooth commercial peanut butter. I will not eat crunchy peanut butter, nor will I even attempt natural, freshly-ground peanut butter from a healthfood store.

Let me drill down the focus of the question: what is in a nut (and I don't care whether a peanut is "technically a legume" for the purpose of this discussion), that is not found in a commercially prepared butter?

What I fail to understand is, with children dying from nut allergy reactions, why is there so little research in truly understanding more of what's going on?

Should it not be a simple enough exercise to analyze the particle content of a peanut and then compare against the content in peanut butter, isolate what's present in the butter that's not in the peanut, what's present in the nut that is absent in the butter...OR, what is in both but different?

That would suggest, in my simple mind, that the allergic agent is not the whole nut itself, but something IN the nut that is somehow either modified or altogether removed when processing for a commercial butter.

Shouldn't the food services industry and health care institutions be looking for concrete answers (if even for the basest purpose of expanding the market to whom they can sell product or reducing the overload on health care services)?

Wouldn't answers to these questions also derive an added benefit of shedding some light on other food allergies, such as to shellfish, or strawberries? There is so much that we don't know, it makes sense to keep pushing to grasp what we can know - this kind of knowledge can save lives.

And, I can readily appreciate that we have arrived at an elegant work-around - I try to avoid foods with questionable ingredients or situations where cross-contamination can occur, and I have antihistamine and steroids available should I be unsuccessful in my avoidance efforts...but there's a wise old saying that I suggest may be appropriate here: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

I do, however, acknowledge, that my argument would suggest I'm calling for genetic modification of the nut so that the protein or other element that is the allergic agent is removed, but do I really believe that "franken-nuts" are a desirable alternative? After all, why change them and spoil the natural enjoyment for those who are not allergic to nuts?

I'd only accept that if I was also willing to believe that the current situation as it is does not already have any modification happening. The very fact that I can eat certain peanut butters indicates clearly that things are already being modified, albeit "by accident". As such, I'd suggest that if we can understand what is actually happening, then we can be deliberate in how and when such modification happens.